a Ship in a Bottle.
Hello, guy named “nifr” who left neither link nor Twitter handle! This one goes out to you, wherever you are. It should be obvious that this drawing is of a Ship in a Bottle. But this thing is nearly extinct, so maybe it’s not obvious. Let me explain:
Kids, in the olde days, there was a great fellowship of people who shared a mysterious skill. When society still had no blogs, and social networks were just a twinkle in the eye of Ma Bell, intelligent people had to signal their superiority by simply doing the impossible. Unable to build tech startups, men agreed on a single task that would be inconceivably complex and seemingly doomed to failure: they would, under cover of darkness and in great secrecy, assemble tiny sailing ships in glass bottles, then stand proudly next to the mantle and the embottled boat upon it, drinking Crème de Menthe and feeling astonishing. For who could know the means by which the weathered planks were bent, or how the sails were set, or what tiny sailor painted the buxom mermaid at the prow?
No, gentle reader, there is no vanishingly small coxswain. There are two ways for a full-grown man to put a proud galleon in that Lambrusco. Yes, there is the easy way: put a slim little hull through the neck, masts hinged and collapsed against the deck; with a single drawn string, you have built your mystery (and still half a glass of Crème de Menthe!)
Our drawing, fast as it is (only ten seconds by David’s hand) does it the hard (some may say “right”) way. Look at that proud hull! Imagine the scores of miniscule sailors who might reside below deck—the casks of wine and endless bolts of velvet. This ship took tweezers, lads! Tweezers and tiny dowels dotted with glue. Certainly, it was a roughly disassembled prefab boat, but those pieces came together over weeks of late nights and spent bottles of minty green liqueur. A builder of such a fine Fastest Possible Boat in a Bottle would have reason to lord it over his or her peers. Because yes, he or she had looked down the neck of an empty jug and seen the face of God.
Ah, the human quest to be perfect is no different today than it ever was, children. Time was, long ago, when a man had mastered golf and cribbage, and the Bottle inevitably called. And it was half-full of Crème de Menthe.
So there you go, “nifr”: the Fastest Possible Drawing of a Ship in a Bottle. I trust it will help you feel astonishing today.
